Dervishes

by Beth Helms

  “Hey,” I said. “Want to go up to the garden? Throw rocks at the construction site?”

  “Not so much,” she said. “I think I want to read.”

  She took the book back from me and flipped through the pages. I picked up the copy of The Officer’s Wife; it was sitting on her bedside table, sandwiched among a collection of boarding-school books.

  I read out loud: “‘Detailed Weekly Schedule for Household with One Maid. Monday—general cleaning of the house. Collect laundry, dry cleaning and leather to be polished. Inspection. Tuesday—laundry. Iron silk underwear. Wednesday—defrost Frigidaire.’”

  Catherine said, “Do you mind?”

  “‘Thursday—clean stove, breadbox, cake box. Friday—clean silver. Polish flatware one week and hollow ware the next.’ What’s hollow ware?”

  “Fine,” she said. She riffled pages. “‘The five pillars of Islam. Belief in the oneness of God and the finality of the prophethood of Muhammad. Establishment of the daily prayers. Almsgiving to the needy. Self-purification through fasting. The pilgrimage to Mecca.’”

  “‘An inspection of the house once a week is essential, no matter what a jewel your maid may be. All the more reason if she is lax or inexperienced. A close inspection tones up the morale of a household, lets a servant know you have your finger on the pulse of the household, that you know what the score is.’” I stopped. “Like Simone, I guess.”

  “She doesn’t know the score,” said Catherine. She paused and read on for a moment. Then she looked up.

  “For instance, she’s been giving alms to the needy, and she certainly doesn’t know that. Listen: ‘there is none worthy of worship except God and Muhammad is the messenger of God. That’s Shahada.’”

  “Simone is giving alms to the needy how exactly?”

  “Her earrings, for one. A few other things.”

  I snapped the book shut. “You’re going to get in serious trouble here. I hate to be the one to break it to you.”

  “We’re saving money to go somewhere.”

  “Whose money? We who?”

  Catherine lifted her hands. The book was open on her lap; she was sitting Indian-style. “There’s somewhere we want to go,” she said. “John and I. Mecca, maybe. Istanbul. Somewhere.”

  “Mecca?” I said. “You and the houseboy are going to Mecca? That’s rich.”

  Catherine shot me a look. She closed the book with a bang. She said, “We’re done here, right?”

  Of course I was struck stupid by the romance of it—the hazy idea of the two of them running off through the city, traveling through the countryside, along the seashore, through poppy fields and olive groves and miles of ocher-colored nothingness. I was dazzled by the lyricism of trains, by the mechanics of shared meals and too little money and highly improper sleeping arrangements.

  The next day, I threw myself into riding, into life among horses, into the dusty otherworld of Balgat. I polished saddles and bridles and crusty bits. My fingers were striped with cuts from baling wire; I stank of manure and the wet, brown, sticky sweet of oats. I mucked out stalls and threw hay bales from the loft onto the concrete strip below; my back ached, I grew stronger. There were older girls at Balgat then, slinky, lanky teenage girls who went to the American school on the base and rode their expensive horses with finesse. They allowed me to pal around with them in a distant way; they admitted me to the fringes of their hysteria, their debauched laughter. Everything about them, everything they did, reeked of sex and mystery. Up in the hayloft they furthered international relations with the grooms via cross-cultural sex games in which more was insinuated than accomplished. Some afternoons I was allowed to sit with them and listen, though what went on was largely incomprehensible to me. We perched on hay bales, some stacked as high as the ceiling: the boards gaped beneath our feet and below we heard the movement of the animals, glimpsed a sleek curve of wither or ducking neck. Looking down was dizzying, a distinct sensation of danger. The loft was dark; the air danced with insects and was warm with the powerfully green aroma of hay. Blades of it pricked ankles and arms and the light from the one small window made everything glow golden, glancing off polished black boots and hard hats, the corn-silk hair of the girls, the bare, honeyed flesh of their breasts in dipping sweaters. The grooms slouched and leered, huddled together, occasionally stretching their long, dark arms and legs in a pretense of ease, exchanging studied, offhand remarks that no one understood.

  At school Catherine wrinkled her nose when I sat down beside her. The look on her face made me think of her mother.

  When a horse went wild one day and tore loose through the barn, slipped in a river of muck and tea-colored urine and ripped his knee wide and bloody, I stayed long past dark, after my mother had gone, holding the stripped, flayed skin together while Ahmet repaired it carefully with a long and vicious-looking needle. We knelt together in the warm straw, only a lantern illuminating the wound and the deep corners of the stall. The wind whipped around the buildings outside, leaves blew in against our faces, and Uğurlu—it meant Lucky—stamped and shivered, his skin fluttering like black silk across the great scaffold of his bones. Ahmet murmured quietly, clucking with his tongue, putting his big hands on the horse’s leg to still him.

  He looked up at me once and said, “He wasn’t today, was he? Uğurlu?”

  Ahmet finished, smearing ointment on Uğurlu’s sewn-up foreleg, patting his soft, blowing nose, and then he took up the lantern and went for something else. I stood freezing in the dark, clinging to Uğurlu’s huge, warm neck. It seemed like a long time there: my arms around the steaming heat of his body, my voice reaching for his fur-lined ear. The scent of what Ahmet had concocted reached me long before he returned: molasses and bran and steam, apples and something else, something heady and milky and powerful.

  He winked at me; the heavy, sloshing bucket was no struggle for him. He put the lantern and the bucket down in the straw. “Sahlep for horses,” he said. “For comfort.”

  He saw my face in the flickering light. “Poppies?” he said. “You’ve heard of poppies? Opium? No? Taste.”

  I put my finger in the dark bucket and tasted oats, sickly sweet with molasses and hot milk, and something else that tasted strangely of sleep. I pulled my finger from my mouth to say this but Uğurlu’s head was there at my shoulder, impatient and nuzzling. He pushed me aside and buried his great, white-splashed nose in the bucket.

  We closed up the stall against the wind and Ahmet drove me home. My hands were stained with Betadine and blood, his ancient car chugged reluctantly into Gasi Osman Paşa; we rode mostly in silence. In the flickering night light of the city, half dozing, I watched his hands on the wheel, his stern, hawkish profile facing forward.

  Riding is like driving a car, he always said, never look down. Look to where you’re going, not where you are. I fell asleep on the seat beside him and he half carried me upstairs: his coat smelled of rubbing alcohol and that sweet, sleepy mash and I was happy in his arms; I pretended to be far more drowsy and helpless than I was.

  November 1975

  10

  SHIVERING, GRACE SIPS SAHLEP FROM A MUG BY THE SIDE OF THE riding ring. It’s November now and the wind is bitter, whining around the corners of the buildings: the sky seems like an enormous pewter serving tray, etched with tarnish. Ahmet has brewed the drink for her in his trailer—powdered orchid root mixed with hot milk and cinnamon. It tastes warm, exotic, and the ingredients look a bit like an illegal substance; the orchid root is ground to a fine powder, like pale, sugary sand. It is a common remedy for sore throats and coughs but today Grace feels quite well. She wears boots and a long sheepskin coat, a style borrowed from Bahar. Kismet is a word you hear often in Turkey.

  This is what Ahmet calls it, their meeting as they have, here at this dilapidated stable with the two dusty rings, the swaybacked fences, the peeling row of bleachers between two scrawny trees. The stables are shaped in a long L; the rows of stalls meet in a neat right angle.

  This
year she is ahead of schedule: she has mailed her Christmas cards and begun to hang the ones she has received around the fireplace, a custom that bewilders Firdis. Sitting bundled by the ring, her legs drawn up and tucked inside her coat, Grace watches Ahmet canter easily around on Bahar’s horse, in a fisherman’s sweater and tan britches, his hands in leather gloves, his legs tight against the saddle. To the left, in the distance, is Atatürk’s tomb, a stark, somber memorial with columns and long stretches of flat marble: there’s the impression, the dark, glassine look, of water.

  And where is Bahar? It’s been weeks since Grace has heard from her and each day that passes without word brings a kind of relief. Now, during the days, while Canada is in school, Grace is at the stables, huddled in the trailer with Ahmet. She cannot help but feel a kind of comparison, a need to measure up against Bahar’s exotic beauty and fashion, her polished demeanor, her chilly wit.

  Not that Ahmet has touched her. But there is a growing sense of comfort and well-being, an ease she hasn’t felt in years. It is like suddenly breathing without a catch in one’s chest, after having become entirely used to one. She thinks: I’ve never really been at rest with anyone. And she believes that here, in this shabby little trailer with a near stranger—who remains, no matter how many hours they talk, seductively unfamiliar—she is being fully and entirely herself.

  They speak of all sorts of things, of his wife, who is ill, of Rand, who has gone back to the embassy and fallen into his usual routine. They talk of Canada, of Grace’s inability to reach her in any significant way.

  Sometimes Grace thinks to call out to her, when she hears her key in the lock, if she is sitting in the living room, reading, leafing through a magazine, or thinking through a menu. But on the rare occasions she’s given in to this urge, the outcome has been less than encouraging. Canada stands in front of her, hands locked behind her back, expression not exactly friendly. Innocent questions are met with monosyllables and her feet are in constant motion, shuffling on the parquet—itching, it seems, to be gone. Grace gives up. If this is growing up, then so be it. If this is what teenagers are like, shades of what’s ahead of her, fine.

  Ahmet laughs at this, but remotely, as he has no children of his own. He talks of serving in the cavalry, and of horses, always of horses. This is a lovely thing about him, his way with animals, his gentle authority. Perhaps Bahar felt like this as well, that she would like nothing more than to be a creature in his competent care, subject to the warmth of his practiced hands. Everything else is so tangled, so knotty and intricate; there is beauty in the simplicity of animals, and in Ahmet’s manner around them—his hand running down a foreleg, feeling for heat, the gentle clucking noise he makes in his throat, the way the horses duck supple heads into his sure hands. Their needs seem so elemental.

  “Tell me about your husband, this marriage you have,” Ahmet asks. Grace sees in his quiet, knowing manner, his drowsy-eyed glance, his quick flash of teeth, that many women have found him irresistible. He does not hide that and it does not detract from his charm. On the contrary.

  “My maid is pregnant,” she says instead. “It’s quite a conundrum. I can’t imagine doing without her. Isn’t that awful? She seems to want me to help somehow.” Grace laughs; it is a nervous, vulnerable sound.

  Ahmet looks at her over his tea. He is assembling a bridle in his lap; he seems not to need to look to do it. The leather pieces, jumbled, darkly slick with oil, come together like a puzzle ring in the market.

  “Your husband,” he says gently. “What is he like?”

  Really, what is there to say? Grace travels the facts in her mind: the details of her life, each isolated in a particular city, an apartment, each connected and influenced by trivial facts—a south-facing window, an unpredictable elevator, a fruit stand on the corner. She sees her life in these small aspects, thinks of her shoes traveling uneven sidewalks, the noise of new languages in her ears like an assault, the fright of assimilating, and of adapting, always adapting. New people, new obligations, new social structures to decipher and navigate—places where the smallest misstep holds the potential for irreversible disaster.

  They’d met on a blind date and she’d pursued him; it’s not a fact she can overlook. She had wanted to shake off her childhood, the tight, icy little Canadian town and her father’s magnificent, untempered disapproval. But Rand had had a different sort of life—the youngest in a houseful of sisters, and the women, smothering, pink and lacy, forever smelling of biscuits, had kept him like a pet. He’d not much wanted marriage, or children; he had not wanted a household’s worth of furniture and bric-a-brac.

  Still, there had been moments, drives through the Alps and wine and cassoulet, dancing and easy laughter. Christmases and holidays had been captured in photographs; there were gingerbread villages and pillow talk, cathedrals and ruins. Once, they had punted down a sun-speckled river, under a dreamy canopy of greenery. Always, of course, there was talk of his career, of who needed to be buttered or snubbed, feted or one-upped, letters she’d helped write requesting better posts or positions, people she hated whom she had cozied up to nonetheless, time spent studying protocols and hierarchies. It seemed like years of striking flimsy bargains, of walking on tiptoe and selling out, a little flesh at a time; hardly noticeable, barely missed.

  But all she can think to say to Ahmet is, “It’s terribly complicated.”

  “Ah,” he says, putting aside the bridle, flashing that smile of his. “Perhaps less so than you think.”

  While they visit, Canada is absorbed in the daily activities of the stable: she’s become a companion to the Turkish grooms—rough trade, these young men, with their bad teeth and uneasy grins, drooping trousers, cheap shoes. At Ahmet’s instruction they teach Canada to care for the animals, but their manner with her is not exactly willing or generous. Grace sees them exchanging looks over Canada’s bent head, as she leans to clean a hoof or bandage a leg, looks that might be construed as lewd or unfriendly, signaling that she is an intruder, unwelcome, and forced on them. But Grace doesn’t bring this to Ahmet’s attention. She doesn’t want to make something of nothing, or in any way threaten the time they spend together. Nor does it escape her that Canada doesn’t like her new friendship with Ahmet. She’s not altogether displeased by the look on Canada’s face when she finds them together, which she reads as bitter surprise.

  Sometimes lately, provoked by an astonishing new boldness, she stands behind him and rubs at the knots in his shoulders, feeling the wool of his sweater beneath her fingers, and under it, the contour of bone and muscle. Though he is older, Ahmet’s body seems younger than Rand’s. Ahmet is slender framed, almost lupine, and she imagines that his back is covered with soft hair, but the idea does not repulse her, not at all. He moves his shoulders under her touch, not making sounds of enjoyment—which would seem a weakness on his part, a thing she would not like—but turning his neck from side to side like an animal, putting against her fingers the places he wants attended. She closes her eyes and feels his skin under her hands, the knobs of his spine: she inhales the lovely mixed-up scent of him. She thinks of the previous week, when Paige Trotter had found the shape of a bird in her coffee grounds. Look, she’d said, a wish your heart desires.

  And one autumn day Ahmet catches her hand with his own, bringing it down across his shoulder to his face. He breathes against her palm, warm air brushes her skin; he puts each of her fingers to his lips.

  “Grace,” he says, “I think you are making your life more complicated.”

  It isn’t clear what he means. She stands motionless behind him, her hand frozen in his, her knees locked.

  “I mean,” he says, and his grip loosens, letting her hand fall awkwardly away, “that for a woman who desires simplicity, you have a way of tangling things.”

  Grace pulls her hand back; she rubs her palms against her hips. She hears herself breathing and strives to quiet it.

  “Don’t misunderstand,” he says.

  “Have you heard fro
m Bahar?” Grace feels suddenly breathless; the air has turned to glass.

  “She was here,” he says after a moment’s pause.

  “When?”

  “Recently.”

  Grace steps away from him; her hand still holds the warmth of his. Her face is hot, her skin itches. She drags a hand down the side of her face and then begins to tidy the papers on his desk, to shuffle them together: invoices and bills in illegible scripts, Turkish handwriting—with its cedillas and breves, ogoneks and carons—scrawled across slips of colored paper.

  “Please don’t do that,” he says. “Please sit down.”

  She perches on the arm of the sofa; it creaks under her weight.

  “I should go,” she says, but makes no move to.

  “It’s not as you think,” he says, after a moment. “Bahar is not a woman who knows what she wants. She is always changing her thoughts. She does not expect that those of others might change as well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He sighs. Grace studies his face for clues as to what he is thinking. He seems tired. She wonders if she has misjudged again, if this man she has decided to fall in love with is a cad, if she has made, or is on the road to making, a monumental fool of herself.

  She thinks of an argument she had with Rand just this morning; how willing she’s been in recent weeks to provoke him, to instigate trouble. She’s been reckless and impulsive—calling things the way she sees them, for once. She’d looked at him standing in the doorway of the apartment, his eyes puffy, the map of broken capillaries around his nose more prominent than usual. His shirt was pressed and he smelled of that familiar amalgam of his—liquor and aftershave, too much alcohol altogether.

  “Straighten up,” she said. “Pull yourself together. I’m sick to death of it.”

  He looked confused—when did she ever speak to him like that? He kept his hand on the doorknob, staring at her.